Meet the new WineDirect

Welcome to our new website! We’ve recently made some big changes to offer you a more seamless DTC experience, including folding Vin65 into the WineDirect brand. Got questions? Learn more here, or

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VIN65 is now

As of November 2nd, Vin65 is now WineDirect. We've made this change to offer you a more seamless DTC experience. You'll see that our branding has changed, but our commitment to providing you with best-in-class DTC software remains the same. Got questions? Learn more here, or

Instagram Can Make Your Wines Attractive

A wine marketing campaign can be a tricky thing to do with oenophiles because they can be a finicky bunch and are very conscious of the wines they consume. Even casual wine drinkers have particular tastes when it comes to imbibing socially or at home watching a movie. Having a campaign that caters to all of them can be a game of fitting a round cork on top of a square bottle. Social media helps alleviate this problem by utilizing trends and discussions from consumers to turn into marketing and sales opportunities. Recent changes to the popular photo-sharing site Instagram in particular have made it possible for wine merchants to deliver a visually appealing campaign with a lot less effort and a lot more interaction with drinkers.

Instagram does things differently as a social media outlet in comparison to its parent company Facebook or even the likes of Pintrest and Twitter. For one, it's photo-centric. As Kate Harrison of Forbes notes, you can't really push any form of copy on the app, whether it's advertising or otherwise. Links are also particularly useless in photo posts. The main draw is the visuals: Really good photos with or without extra filters that can make even the most banal thing seem pretty. Interaction with these photos can increase a wine drinker's interest in your product. What helps businesses with garnering attention is the recent addition of web-based profiles which are similar in structure to Facebook profiles and gives consumers a single hub where they can learn more about products and the company in general.

In vino transparensBecause there are few direct ways to sell your wines on the app, the purpose of an Instagram account is to bolster your winery's image and reputation. That may seem a difficult task, but what makes using the site effective as a marketing tool is that you don't necessarily have to focus on your bottles of wine all the time. Instead, you can build the brand around what you are as a wine merchant and create a relationship with your customers that turns into a loyal source of revenue. Rather than images of just bottles of wine, there should be something else in the picture. For example, pairing a newly available vintage of pinot noir with some vegan stuffed mushrooms or pork tenderloin in a photo can entice customers and probably make them hungry.

In addition to putting your wines together with people and food, PracticalEcommerce suggest visually demonstrating a bit of the business, so to show users that you're more than just some faceless winery. This can include images of winemakers tasting the first batch of a vintage to be sold, grapes on the farm and/or the pressing process. By giving this sort of behind-the-scenes look, potential customers get a distinct impression that there are real people behind this business.

Social means interactionGiven that Instagram is a social media outlet, the emphasis with marketing on the site isn't enticing through visuals, but interacting with customers. Creating hashtags specific to your brand can enable wine drinkers to talk about your products in a manner that promotes it indirectly. With brand-specific hashtags, you can easily monitor consumers and even like or comment on their posts as a show of support. Monitoring the site can also let you seek out certain accounts that have an established audience and talking with them directly about promoting your varieties through posts and comments. Working with a foodie or oenophile account, for example, can grab people's attention simply because their notoriety will increase interest in your selection. Having your employees post photos of your bottles of wine can also boost your promotional value. After all, there are few things on the photo site shared more often than pictures of people's meals.